After practice the other day, he said it means: “Things need not be said that are understood.”

In football, he said, “Just let your play do your talking. If you have to tell people you’re good, you’re probably not that good. It’s not just in sports. The best in their fields don’t talk about themselves.”

With the health of cornerbacks Alijah Holder and Malik Antoine in question for Friday night’s season opener against San Diego State, Adebo may well start in his college debut.

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“His confidence is up,” secondary coach Duane Akina said. “His strength level is up. He’s understanding the game conceptually. I’m excited to watch him play. He’s going to get his opportunities (right from the start). You’re going to get used to his name as the season wears on.”

At 6-foot-1, 189 pounds, Adebo has the height that’s increasingly important for cornerbacks in the era of tall wide receivers. He was a wide receiver as well as cornerback and return man at Mansfield (Texas) High School, the school that produced Stanford’s all-time career rushing leader, Stepfan Taylor. Cardinal safety Brandon Simmons is also from Mansfield but went to archrival Timberview.

Adebo, whose full name is Saiid Paulson Adebo, said French was his first language. His mother, Pauline Domingo, is a native of the West African nation of Benin, where French is the official language. She teaches it at Texas-Arlington.

Adebo has two brothers, Dell and Mouf, the latter of whom played defensive end and linebacker at Sam Houston State before graduating last year.

Before Stanford offered him a scholarship, Adebo had committed to Notre Dame. “Stanford was always the school I wanted to go to,” he said.

Safety Frank Buncom said Adebo is “a very smart guy. The thing I love about Paulson is he digs deep into things. He won’t just stay surface-level. He’s a vegetarian. I think he probably started that his senior year in high school.”

According to Akina, Adebo would have played last year had this year’s rule allowing players to take part in four games before losing their redshirt status been enacted in 2017.

“He’s a long, rangy corner that can really run, so he’s got a margin for error,” Akina said. “Great work ethic. He’s got all the athletic things I look for.”

Citing two All-America defensive backs he coached at Texas and Arizona, he said, “You don’t know in recruiting that Earl Thomas was going to be what he was, or Chris McAlister, until you get them. You see how they handle competition, you see their work ethic. They have great ability.” The same is true for Adebo, he said. “I think he’s got a tremendous upside.”

Adebo didn’t mind redshirting.

“My technique has gotten a lot better, being comfortable in the scheme of things,” he said. “Coming in as a freshman, it’s a lot to handle. It’s harder than it looks to come in and play. So I think the redshirt year was definitely needed. It gave me a lot of time to learn from the older guys, like Justin Reid and Quenton Meeks.”

Adebo has impressed head coach David Shaw. “To the chagrin of our quarterbacks, he’s been able to take a couple of balls back in training camp,” Shaw said.

Wide receiver Trent Irwin, who faces Adebo regularly in practice, said, “He’s a friggin’ workaholic. I see him out here (after practice) visualizing his steps, visualizing his breaks (on the ball). I think he’s going to be great.”

Tom FitzGerald has been the Stanford beat writer for The San Francisco Chronicle since 2009. He also covers men’s and women’s basketball and many other Stanford sports.

He also covers motor sports in the Bay Area and wrote about the America's Cup regatta in San Francisco in 2013, during which Oracle Team USA made one of the greatest comebacks in sports history to beat Emirates Team New Zealand.

Among the many momentous games he has covered were the 49ers' victory over Dallas in the 1982 NFC Championship Game, which featured "The Catch'' by Dwight Clark, and the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 Olympic upset of the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y. At the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, he rode the bobsled run with members of the U.S. team for a first-person story. He also rode on Russell Coutts’ Oracle Team USA catamaran in 2012 and in an Indy car with legendary Mario Andretti in 2014 for other first-person stories.

For 15 years he wrote a popular sports humor column called "Top of the Sixth" (later re-titled "Open Season"). A weekly version of the column was nationally syndicated in as many as 50 daily newspapers.

He has a degree in political science from the University of Massachusetts. He lives in Benicia.